Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
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Longview IoT Boosts Energy and Wireless Efficiency

Some of the biggest challenges slowing down the adoption of IoT are security, efficient battery usage and optimized wireless communications.One company has...

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Hallmark's Simple, Inexpensive Way to Boost Customer Satisfaction

In an effort to boost margins, companies often push more users to automated solutions such as FAQs, chatbots, voice bots and anything...

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Huawei Places the World's First 5G VoNR Video Call

Huawei recently completed the world's first voice over NR (VoNR) call. The voice and video call service was made using two Huawei...

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IGEL Advances Future of Work

IGEL is a provider of a next-gen edge OS for cloud workspaces. The company’s software products include IGEL OS, IGEL UD Pocket (UDP) and Universal...

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Tata Communications and Cisco Collaborate on SD-WAN

Tata Communications and Cisco have extended their partnership to enable enterprises to transform their legacy network to a customized and secure multi-cloud...

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How to Win the 50-Year-Old China Trade War

Today and this week in-fact is historic - the left and right in the U.S. agree that we have a major trade...

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Extreme Elements Enables The Autonomous Enterprise

Extreme Networks just announced Extreme Elements which in-turn enables the autonomous network and subsequently the autonomous enterprise. In a dynamic webinar, Dan...

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AT&T makes deal with the devil (cable companies)

August 19, 2004

I was reading on Cnet and several other news outlets that AT&T struck some deals with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Charter Communications. But have they struck a deal with the devil? Will the cable companies turn on AT&T? Read on...

U.S. Soldiers in Iraq using VoIP to call home

August 19, 2004

Whether you are in the Bush or Kerry camp, and as divisive this election year has become, I think we can all agree that we should support our troops.

I was surfing the web and came across a company, Freedom Calls Foundation, that is offering free VoIP and video services to our troops abroad so they can call home for free. When you haven't seen your loved ones for months at a time, having not just voice capabilities, but also video to "see and virtually feel" your loved ones from afar is a real morale booster for our troops. I'm sure seeing live video has a very powerful impact on the miiltary families.

Vonage new 311 service

August 18, 2004

Vonage just recently announed their new 311 service which lets you access local government services and information based on where you are located. Good stuff! Vonage 311 Service

Unfortunately, when I tried it on my Vonage line, all I got was a fast busy. I went back to their website and noticed they have a very limited number of cities supporting the 311 service- 13 total cities in fact with 7 coming soon.

Broadband overtakes narrowband dialup woohoo!

August 18, 2004

Since I'm a bandwidth fan/nut/hog, I thought I would share this interesting release announcing that broadband has overtaken narrowband, i.e. dial-up. Just don't tell my dad he's in the minority and he needs broadband - he says he's fine surfing the Web at 56kbps. Add my co-worker, gadget-phobe, former Microsoft-patch-a-phobe and somewhat of a "technology Luddite", Robert Hashemian to that list of "holdouts" still surfing..

MCI deploys Ericsson's VoIP Engine solution

August 18, 2004

Ericsson and MCI Inc. today announced an agreement to deploy Ericsson's Engine solution to migrate MCI's US-based international gateway traffic from traditional circuit switching to carrier-class Voice over IP (VoIP).

Building on its domestic VoIP migration plans, announced in June 2003, MCI has become one of the first U.S.-based service providers to provision the transition of its international voice service to its core IP backbone. Already well into the deployment of Ericsson's latest generation voice switching platform into the network, MCI
expects to begin transitioning traffic by mid 2005.

The reasons for the migration to an all IP backbone are simple:
1) It enables MCI to flexibly and cost-effectively converge international voice services onto its IP backbone to optimize the network.
2) It increases efficiency and realizes operational savings while providing more value and feature offerings (such as "follow me") to customers.
3) By having a 100% IP core, MCI can become a "true" international phone company offering phone service throughout the world.


Kagoor Delivers Session Border Control Solution For Voice over Broadband

August 17, 2004

Remember Aravox Technologies? Well I do. They were one of the first companies to offer a session border control (SBC) that solves the issue of NAT traversal over VoIP without compromising security. Basically a SBC device, is an edge device that opens and maintains a secure hole through a firewall for real-time traffic, such as voice over IP or video.

VoIP via power lines

August 17, 2004

First came voice over copper and for a over one hundred years voice was carried over copper. Then came wireless which allowed car phones and cell phones to flourish. Next, came the Internet and we had Voice over the Internet aka Voice over IP (VoIP) over dial-up (ex: VocalTec's Internet Phone, Microsoft Netmeeting). Next came broadband and much improved VoIP offerings from Vonage and other players using ATA devices such as the Cisco ATA-186 and now Sipura.

Pingtel drops hardware and goes all open source

August 17, 2004

It was only a matter of time before Pingtel switched to a completely 100% software company. (See: Pingtel Completes Strategic Transition with Sale of Its Award-Winning xpressa Desktop Phone Product Line)

First, let me state that I've always loved Pingtel's VoIP phones which include a very cool LCD display with the ability to run Java applets. In fact, their vision was that users could access the phonebook on the LCD display, lookup a local pizzeria, and even be "pushed" a coupon for a discount or special.

But the high pricetag on the Pingtel phones as well as competition from Cisco and other VoIP phones that also often had LCD displays took some of the competitive advantage away from Pingtel.

Windows XP SP2, Skype and Limiting the number of connections

August 16, 2004

VoIP Forum and other Technology Forums: Windows XP SP2, Skype, eMule
I posted this in the VoIP forums and thought it would be useful to blog it as well:

I've noticed some problems with the number of simultaneous connections after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).

Apparently, as a security measure, Microsoft has limited the number of simultaneous connections to 10 to reduce the spread of viruses such as MSBlast.

As a side effect, this has slowed down many eMule users and I've noticed some issues with my Skype client.

Well, I found a patch for it! It patches the new TCPIP.SYS file in the C:\Windows\system32\drivers directory. It does a simple change to the hex value 10 in the file. more...





Hawking cracks black hole paradox

August 13, 2004

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